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A Lot Of Lessons Learned

It’s been a year since my last blog post and I have had little desire to continue posting, but I figured I needed to update it every once in a while…once a year just makes me feel a little too special, and my ego can’t handle that.

This is more of a series of rants…

Over the past year I’ve had to deal with a lot of new stuff. New projects, failed projects, almost shutting down Affiliit.com at one point, jumping in and out – then back in to different Traffic sources. Success, failure and everything in between. I’ve been pretty busy, too busy as a matter of fact, but thankfully I’m starting to become more organized and the stress levels have come down quite a bit.

I have a habit of trusting people too much. It’s a bad habit that I’ve carried around my entire life, but I don’t regret it as I’ve met a lot of good people because of it…unfortunately, I’ve met more bad people than good, but the good seems to over shadow the bad.

One thing I had experience with is that I was nice enough to hand over a bunch of free subscriptions to Affiliit.com when we originally opened. Most of those subs were rarely used, a good portion of those people who did use theirs have been extremely helpful, a few have hit SERIOUS goals (including a Million dollar success story, etc.), but then there’s always a bad apple that you help far too often only to have that person stab you in the back. But I’d do it all over if I had the chance. You always have people who don’t actually do work, yet they want to talk down on your program. Then you have people who NEVER get involved in the program, yet come back to post their success stories (pretty awesome!).

It pretty much averages out across any training program, I’m sure. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of people through affiliit.com and hope to meet a few offline at some upcoming meetup’s in the near future.

Over the past few years I’ve done a lot of Lead Gen, but over the past 4 months I’ve become more and more involved and have been learning a ton from it. It’s funny that some of my SEO sites never even had email forms on them, and some still don’t. I still have a ton of sites to work on, but I’ve slowly updated most of them over the past few months to make sure I collect as many email addresses as I can (I know, this site doesn’t have anything right now…but it did!).

I’ve learned that people love to criticize tips and tricks without even trying them. “Test everything, assume nothing.” Don’t be an idiot. If someone tells you they’re making $500 a day with a little tip, give it a shot or leave it alone, but why criticize someone for the tip? I see that all the time on various blogs, forums, etc. it drives me crazy.

I’m still amazed by how people freak out when Google Updates their Algo. Really, do we have to do this on every update? If you’d just optimize your sites the right way – you’d NEVER have to worry about the updates as much as most of you do. Leave the tricks alone for important sites.

Why do people think you have to be an expert at everything in this Business? There’s so much stuff involved in Internet Marketing that you could never know enough, much less everything. I’ve made money with every traffic source possible, and I’ve lost money as well…but if someone said they were EXPERTS at every traffic source, I’d stay far, far away from that person. I don’t consider myself an expert on any traffic source, but I have more working-knowledge than most so-called “experts” that you’ll find. I’ve been in this game for a long time and I’ve forgotten more information that I could ever teach.

I got back into PHP this year and learned that I still hate it. At least I was able to brush up on my skills, improve some tools on Affiliit.com and also develop some other tools for myself, along with other useful stuff.

There’s too many Affiliate Programs out there that do everything they can to screw their affiliates out of money…if the affiliates would rise up and walk away, those programs would die, along with the product(s) behind it. I’m not talking about CPA Networks, or even networks at all. I’m referring to private networks for products/services. I have issues with people trying to save a dollar through PayPal Mass Pay and instead want their hard working affiliates to get raped on the charges… stupid. Lazy. Pathetic. If I had more time, I’d create a competing product just to take them out. And I know I could, because I helped them become who they are.

If you really take a look into training programs out there, you’ll suddenly get the feeling that only a few are run by real affiliates who actually do what they teach… 😉

I’m currently brushing up on my design skills (if that’s what you’d call them) so I can create new designs for some of my sites. I actually enjoy designing stuff, and I could never find any good designers that were worth a damn that didn’t charge an arm and a leg for simple shit.

I sometimes get caught up in trying to make things perfect, as if I were going to be criticized for the work I do. I’m not sure why I do it, but I’ve come to the realization that it takes me a lot longer to finish projects because of that. On the other hand, I can’t stand working with people who want to throw up bullshit and think people should be OK with it. “Just get it done quick” is a stupid idea unless it’s done right… it actually caused me to nearly give up on Affiliit at one point. I hate being rushed.

I’m currently in the process of creating multiple projects and have teamed up with someone I actually met through affiliit. I’m hoping things get moving so we can get one of them done within the next few months. I think it will be pretty awesome!

Eh, again, this is really just a bunch of rants. I guess it’s a way to feel like I’m catching up on this blog. I’ve already got some posts in the works, so I’ll be posting them this week.